


vesuvius, i am here

by meguri_aite



Category: K (Anime)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-18
Updated: 2015-12-18
Packaged: 2018-05-06 23:35:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,253
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5435042
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meguri_aite/pseuds/meguri_aite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The thing is, Izumo can be unreasonable about things - about him - sometimes, and it drives Mikoto mad, because Izumo should know better than that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	vesuvius, i am here

**Author's Note:**

  * For [copperiisulfate](https://archiveofourown.org/users/copperiisulfate/gifts).



i.

He wakes up because something heavy lands on his chest and nearly knocks the wind out of him.

Izumo rubs his eyes with the back of his hand to let his vision adjust to the dark of the bedroom, but not because he needs to see to know what’s there.

“Did you think the pillow was no good, Mikoto? Getting restless with age? You used to be able to sleep on the bare floor just fine, you know.”

He reaches out to stroke the heavy arm draped against his chest and threatening to crush his windpipe, the movement of his palm deliberately slow to soak up the warmth burning off Mikoto’s body. Izumo can’t help a fond smile. With a bed partner like Mikoto one quickly gets used to the feeling of sleeping next to a lowburn nuclear reactor, the heat radiating off him a constant presence. With Mikoto, in general, one gets used to living next to a nuclear reactor, until every other place becomes too spacious and quiet.

“Mmph,” is the only response he hears, directed somewhere into the pillow. Which isn’t entirely fair, given that Izumo is the one whose sleep has been interrupted, but he doesn’t mind. His hand follows the line formed by Mikoto’s arm, lingers at the crease of his elbow, feeling a slow, thumping beat under his skin, and traces the veins further down, until he finds Mikoto’s hand resting next to his own jaw.

“You’re kinda cutting off my air supply,” Izumo informs him as he pulls at Mikoto’s fingers, only wanting to move his arm as far as needed to breathe freely again, but instead, Mikoto locks Izumo’s wrist in a grip and pins him down with even more insistence.

“Okay,” Izumo huffs out. “Do you want to tell me what this is about?” He doesn’t really expect to hear an answer, so he tries to read it in the tenseness of Mikoto’s shoulder line, in the way his knuckles brush Izumo’s jaw, Mikoto’s hand curled against it in something between a cradle and a loose fist.

If he didn’t have kids hanging around the place all day long who needed telling to go wreck something that wasn’t his bar for a change, Izumo thinks he might have turned into one of those people who talked to themselves for company. The alternative - switching to manly grunts - isn’t a very attractive option, even though Mikoto manages to get by on that mode of communication just fine. But then again, if his track record was exemplary at anything it would be ignoring the rules of polite company, or anything else he deems unimportant. Maybe therein lies the secret of his charm, even, not that Izumo would have been able to tell, having been living in his orbit for so long. The longest.

Instead of answering, Mikoto shifts in a way that lets him get a better grip on Izumo and hauls him close to his chest in one messy, puzzled heap of human and blanket.

“Mikoto?” Concern, a healthy feeling to have in at least one person between the two of them, and one familiar as the back of his hand, rises to the surface.

“Here.” A warm breath washes over Izumo’s neck, and Mikoto’s body heat envelopes him like it means to cut off the rest of the world from his senses.

 

ii.  

 _Here_ , he says, trying to drop the word like an anchor, but the crown of soft hair tickling his nose and the steady rise and fall under his arm are a better reassurance - and that is fine, because he has never been good with words, and Izumo’s presence has always made it easy not to _have_ to be - and Mikoto doesn’t plan on relaxing his grip, not even if Izumo is going to grumble about his crushed ribcage for days to come.

In his dream, the world burned.

On its own, it wasn’t anything new. The exhilaration of becoming one with the flames, the clarity of the incendiary vision, the bitter smoke in his lungs - all of it was familiar. Even rubble where a city should have been, every sharp bit of  debris under his soles was nothing more than phantom pain that liked to come once every bad weather.

In dreams, he embraced destruction easily, because it was kind of a package deal, wasn’t it - the instant gratification, the power to obliterate and set free, the ashen taste on his tongue, and what came after. It was alright, because all of this was his to take, and he accepted it, and tried not to recall the faces of those who didn’t.

This time around, too, when the flames engulfed the world, he was in the middle of it, and the pyre was built on his bones, and the fire was a dry rush through his veins, right until the sword had nothing more to feed on and fell, empty.  

Except when the sword fell, he wasn’t there.

In this dreamscape, Mikoto stood at the graveyard of a city, knowing two things for certain - that he brought the sword down that destroyed it, and that it was not his head that it fell down on.

At first he stood there, confused, because before the fire, nothing had seemed different, nothing had _felt_ different, and Homra had been annoyingly loud and alive, and Tatara was whistling something and dancing with Anna, and Izumo was there, watching them, watching over them from behind his tinted glasses, ensuring just with his presence that the world had order and meaning to it.

And then he started walking, because if the clan had been there, then a king should have been there, too. And then he saw Tatara holding Anna, actually holding Anna to his chest and looking heartbroken in a way that made it hard to look at him, and Anna said, _Mikoto, the king is dead_ , and Mikoto broke into a run, because it was impossible, it was laughably illogical, it was literally _the worst joke ever_. He couldn’t be the one hearing it, it couldn’t have been someone else’s head under the sword, because that would mean the unthinkable.

It would mean that Mikoto set the world on fire, and Izumo let him, because Izumo would pay the price.

(The thing is, Izumo can be unreasonable about things - about him - sometimes, and it drives Mikoto mad, because Izumo should know better than that. He probably _knows_ better than that, and still lets him.)

The idea is so wrong, so impossible to accept that that the dream collapses under its own absurdity.  He wakes up to the reality where the sword is a weight behind no one’s shoulders but his own, and it is almost soothing.

Izumo is here. Even if he still should know better, he is still here, and he will never see what a sword of Damocles looks like when its tip is pointed at his heart.

 

iii.

“Sleep,” Mikoto says, and Izumo can only guess at the the shape of the emotion that has left a crack in his voice, but he doesn’t get a chance to press for more, because Mikoto immediately contradicts himself and leaves a trail of kisses down his neck that have too much fierce tenderness and teeth and self-loathing in them for either of them to catch any sleep, not yet.

Mikoto is awful at talking, and Izumo is kind of awful at doing anything about it, about him, except having all of him, always.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> happy yuletide, mirai, and please accept my many humble apologies for so liberally defining "anything happier than canon" T_T hope you can enjoy it anyway?? maybe?
> 
> ps. another song title, who would have guessed? a near- eponymous one by sufjan stevens gets the credit


End file.
